#54, June 26, 2004

Reelin’ in the Years (4)

The Contender

I have a great fondness for the early Charlie Chaplin movies. I saw many of them growing up and so I was extremely grateful when my father-in-law gave me the complete video collection about ten years back, though they were only a vague memory by that time. I have since used the movie discussed below and “The Immigrant” in many of my classes. Additionally, when I was trying to think up a topic relating to the theme of corruption that I could spend a year studying at the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton, I used the movie “Easy Street” as my starting point. The proposal that I wrote seemed to do the trick; I was awarded the fellowship and the paper called “Uneasy Streets”, on Corruption in Bombay, London and New York City, that I wrote during that year is soon to be published. For a movie of no more than twenty minutes, with no spoken dialogue, I think you will agree that there is a lot packed in.

“Can we afford to leave anxiety out of the story of empire?”

– Ranajit Guha

Made soon after Charlie Chaplin left New York City for Hollywood in 1915, the movie “Easy Street” portrays one man’s attempts to clean up the violence, drugs, poverty, and general immorality to be found on the city street of the Progressive era.

The police have lost control, the movie suggests, or have still yet to gain it. “Mob” (immigrant) leaders who control and dictate all the happenings on the street oppose them. So weak is the police force in the face of the virtual terror it can no longer recruit policemen. As fast as policemen are sent out onto the street, they return to the police station on stretchers.

But Charlie, “The Derelict,” a broken, impoverished man, is desperate for work. He has sought sustenance at the “Hope Mission,” has stolen the collection box and only returned it after spying the beautiful “mission worker" (Edna Purviance) playing the church's piano. Determined now to be honest and respectable he volunteers for the police force hoping that this will bring him sufficient respectability to make him worthy of this woman.

The problem is that “The Derelict” is no match for the leader of the street’s ruffians, “The Bully” (a frequently used term for pimp), a gigantic man, played by the actor Eric Campbell. But using the strength of “The Bully” to his own advantage Charlie manages to outwit him and with the help of the gas street lamp placed over Campbell’s head and turned on, he reduces him to a state of unconsciousness. Thereupon, several newly emboldened policemen come to cart the huge man off to the police station. With the mob now as afraid of the former “derelict” as they had been of “the bully,” order is briefly restored.

This new calm allows Chaplin, the director, to begin to describe some of the life on this street. We are introduced to the mob leader’s “woman”, who appears simultaneously untamed and a victim of the boss’s violence. We also enter a tenement apartment belonging to an enormous family that needs all the help that the “mission worker” can bring them, as well as the help, the former derelict appears to suggest, of a Margaret Sanger and some birth control.

The order Charlie has brought is fleeting, however. The giant awakes at the station, pulls off his American-made handcuffs with relative ease and proceeds to hurl policemen around the room like so many dummies (which it is obvious that one of them was). He returns to “his woman” and proceeds to have a dish-throwing fight with her, in the process disrupting the scene of comfortable domesticity that Charlie and his love interest have been witnessing. The policeman goes to see what the commotion is all about (presuming that he will be able to deal with it quickly) only to find that he is once again being pursued by the brute. After a long chase around the house, down the street and even off the set, David manages to drop a large stove on Goliath's head and once more he emerges victorious.

Meanwhile, the mob has kidnapped the “mission worker” and thrown her into a cellar with a junky who, in-between shooting-up beneath the pictures of the Russian royal family, tries to molest her. Cutting the story after the chase, Charlie is knocked unconscious, thrown into the cellar, and, instantaneously regaining consciousness, begins to scuffle with this molester. When he accidentally sits on a hypodermic needle, he receives a burst of energy from the heroin that shoots into his rear, and within a few seconds he subdues the whole mob single-handedly and restores order to the street.

The movie’s closing scene reveals that the mission church has moved into a prominent building at the end of the street and that, with Charlie twirling his baton on his beat, all the residents now attend services in their Sunday best. Even the “Bully” walks towards the mission arm-in-arm with the woman we can now presume is his lawfully wedded wife. The policeman links arms with the mission worker and follows them to the mission.

Chaplin’s “Easy Street” might well have been the uneasy streets of any of the cities around the United States and the British Empire at this time. While each city was in many ways unique, the experiences of urban dwellers in combating what was termed “corruption” were generally similar. All city police forces were undergoing considerable reform between 1880 and 1920 to deal with the various vices and “problems” then believed to be common in all cities. These included alcoholism, prostitution, disease, violence, and represented, in short, the threat of anarchy and immorality that new urban dwellers and their mob leaders (the bullies) were believed to be bringing to what were otherwise considered “civilized”, “moral” communities. “Moral control,” “social purity,” and “abolition” movements emerged among reformers and it would be the police who would be charged with quarantining victims of disease, rescuing “fallen women”, protecting “virtuous” ones – in short, combating corruption in its myriad forms.